This Post As Tangentially Related to Leveymg's Most Excellent Recent Diary

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

This Post As Tangentially Related to Leveymg's Most Excellent Recent Diary This post as tangentially related to leveymg's most excellent recent diary "Larger CIA and DoD Privatization Scandal Emerging from Walter Reed Story, US Attorneys Firing" which centers around hedge fund giant Cerberus. If you haven't had a chance to check that diary out, be sure to do so because it is a very worthwhile read. In this diary, we're going to delve into the intertwined, and quite convoluted scandals involving, among st other things: - Alleged bribes to Ariel Sharon by Martin Schlaff, an Austrian industrialist, that were used to pay back illegal campaign contributions Sharon used in 1999. - The scandalous collapse of Refco, the commodity futures giant, and the related collapse of BAWAG, one of Austria's largest banks (Cerberus recently bought BAWAG, BTW). - Martin Schlaff's investment in Yasser Arafat's "Oasis Casino", and that casino was tied into by the BAWAG/Refco scandals AND Ariel Sharon's right-hand-man Dov Weissman. - Martin Schlaff's and George "Macaca" Allen's involvement with the "Xybernaut" pump-and-dump stock fraud. - Martin Schlaff's apparent financier of far-Right Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman - and finally, the potential for a crisis in Israel's democracy due to endemic corruption, and the chilling figures that could take advantage of such a crisis. Get to know your BAWAG So, let's get started with a look at the BAWAG scandal that rocked Austria's politics: Austrian Bank Scandal: When Socialists Play With Money From the desk of Chris Gillibrand on Tue, 2006-04-04 22:53 A major banking scandal is rocking the Austrian political elites – left and right. A bank owned by the Socialist trade union (which is close to the Socialist Party SPÖ, currently in opposition) loses billions in shady hedge deals while the union strike fund evaporates in the Caribbean and the bank gets implicated in a corruption case in Israel. Meanwhile the bank is financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB), and an Austrian Finance Ministry official (married to the Socialist ex-chief of the bank) ignores a crucial report and is appointed to the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB). The Conservative Finance Minister claims to know nothing – after just having sold the Government-owned Post Office Savings Bank (PSK) to the socialist bank. Welcome to Austria, presently presiding the European Union council of ministers. Let me introduce! The Bank für Arbeit und Wirtschaft AG, BAWAG or in English, ‘Bank for Employment and Commerce’ was founded in 1922 by the Socialist Chancellor Karl Renner. Up until now the majority stakeholder in the Bank has been the Austrian Trades Union Federation, the ÖGB. With the repurchase of the shares of the Bayerische Landesbank in 2004, it is now wholly-owned by the ÖGB. The bank’s original intent, from which it has strayed far, was to extend cheap credits to the needy. Almost all of the members of the BAWAG Supervisory Board are fully paid up socialists and trade unionists. The two exceptions are Albert Hochleitner, the ex-CEO of Siemens Austria, and Leo Wallner, the chairman of the state-owned monopoly, Casinos Austria. Günter Weninger, chairman of the Supervisory Board, who has now been forced to resign, also has a day job as the Finance Chief of the ÖGB. He started professional life as an electrician which has given rise to suggestions in the Austrian press that he might have to return to his original trade. The Managing Board has eight members, four of whom have now resigned. The CEO, Johann Zwettler had already resigned in October 2005. He and his predecessor, Helmut Elsner, are now under police investigation. ... Make of note of Casinos Austria's CEO sitting on BAWAG's board, as it will figure in heavily once we get to Arafat's "Oasis Casino". Continuing... ... BAWAG opened up operations in the Caribbean in 1995 under the direction of Wolfgang Flöttl, the son of the then CEO, Walter Flöttl. The idea was that these investments should hedge risk. When it was made public that the son received $2 billion from BAWAG without the father seeking the formal approval of the Supervisory Board, the Caribbean business got closed after a year. The extent of Supervisory Board knowledge is still questioned. After the departure of Flöttl Senior, the business was then reopened by Flöttl’s successor, Helmut Elsner, with Supervisory Board approval after only one year. Elsner was already known as Flöttl’s “man for big business.” Living well, he enjoyed a service penthouse provided on the top of the BAWAG offices in Vienna as had his predecessor, Flöttl. Also provided with a penthouse was the head of the socialist trade union ÖGB, Fritz Verzetnitsch. This time around, Flöttl Junior invested in high-risk funds and the business clocked up a massive loss of almost €1 billion which threatened the solvency of BAWAG in 2000. The Bank was only saved by a guarantee from the ÖGB (trade union dues amount to 1% of members salaries, so they have accumulated quite a lot of money to play with). The losses themselves were systematically covered up in offshore accounts in the Caribbean and accounts at a US futures broker called REFCO. The union strike fund went walkabouts as collateral in the Caribbean and disappeared. ... There's much more interesting info on BAWAG in that article, so be sure to check it out. BAWAG, Refco, Martin Schlaff, PIPEs, and George Allen's Xybernaut scandal Before we move on to look at how BAWAG and Refco were used for money-laundering by Yasser Arafat(with a great deal of intertwined involved by Ariel Sharon's clique), we should note that BAWAG was sold to Cerberus back in December. One of its new board members includes Former Treasury Secretary John Snow. The purchase of a financial behemoth like BAWAG isn't the only major purchase Cerberus has made recently. In addition to the Bank Leumi takeover, Cerberus acquired a majority stake in GMAC last year, and is reportedly eyeing Chrysler. These kinds of mega deals pretty amazing when you consider that Cerberus, starting with $10 million in capital in 1992 started off investing the high-risk corporate debt market, moving into outright acquisitions and management of small distressed companies. The purchase of the ailing BAWAG by Cerberus is also somewhat ironic given that BAWAG, in coordination with Refco, was a significant player in the PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) market. The PIPE market often act as a source of last resort role for small-cap companies in need of a capital infusion. And, it turns out, one of the figures involved in with the BAWAG/Refco dealings in the PIPE Market, is the Austrian billionaire Martin Schlaff that will come up quite a bit in Ariel Sharon's scandals. One of Schlaff's companies used in the PIPE market was Balmore, a British Virgin-Islands-based hedge fund. But Balmore has some other interesting history, as an investor in Xybernaut, a tech company that had George Allen on its board from form August 1998-Dec 2000. Like just about every corporation we're looking at here, Xybernaut's managers, "improperly used substantial company funds for personal expenses" and faces multiple class-action lawsuits. For more Balmore's role in Xybernaut, let's take at look at this Sept 2006 article from the American Prospect: .... Starting in 2000, however, Xybernaut increasingly turned to a newly popular financial instrument to keep growing -- and going: so-called PIPE deals, short for “private investments in public equity.” In such deals, private investors are granted warrants or convertible debentures for stock at below-market rates in exchange for financing. All the investor has to do to make money is sell the stock. But some sleazy PIPE financiers go a step further by shorting the stock of the companies they finance, driving down share prices, diluting the shares of other investors, and even -- in a particularly egregious form of illegal short selling known as the “death spiral finance scheme” -- driving the company into bankruptcy through aggressive rounds of financing and short selling. Between March and November 2000, Xybernaut went from 1 percent to more than 15 percent owned by institutional investors who acquired their stock in the company through private deals, according to media reports. “It really rode the Internet bubble, and it was real hot stuff,” recalls Gregory Sichenzia, of Sichenzia Ross Friedman Ference LLP, a law firm that specializes in securities and PIPE transactions, which he described as an increasingly traditional financing mechanism. “It’s not the fault of the financing that the company collapsed.” Several firms that financed Xybernaut during Allen’s tenure on its board, however, have since been linked to a complicated international network of troubled financers and brokers. For example, in April 1998, Balmore Funds SA and Liechtenstein-based Austost Anstalt Schaan signed a private placement deal with Xybernaut granting the firm up to $11 million. One of their registrations of stock for sale came April 4, 2000 -- shortly after the March price peak and a period of unusually high volume trading, which was followed by yet another “going concern letter,” in mid-March, and a decline in the stock price. The signatory for Austost Anstalt Schaan was Thomas Hackl, who was from 1991 to 2002 head of treasury at BAWAG, the fourth largest Austrian bank (itself somewhat controversial for losing millions in the financing of Yasir Arafat’s casino outside Jericho). TheStreet.com has linked BAWAG to Austost and also to the hedge fund Alpha Capital Aktiengesellschaft, which invested in Xybernaut in 2001. Last year Hackl became a major figure in the collapse of Wall Street brokerage the Refco Corp., where he was executive vice president, in an accounting scandal that wiped out more than $1 billion in shareholder value.
Recommended publications
  • Extreme Prejudice, by Susan Lindauer
    Extreme Prejudice, by Susan Lindauer A review, and important substantive selections Dick Atlee, 30 May 2013 (http://dickatlee.com/issues/911/lindauer_extreme_prejudice.html) (Lindauer site/blog -- http://extremeprejudiceusa.wordpress.com/) "Extreme Prejudice" as a military/intelligence term refers to a person marked for destruction, a usage not inappropriate here. Susan Lindauer, the second cousin -- and eventual victim -- of George W. Bush's chief-of-staff Andrew Card (and others), is an anti-war and anti-Iraq-sanctions activist. Bur she was also the "backdoor" intelligence Asset for the U.S. government, under handlers from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, for communication with the Libyan government regarding the Lockerbie plane bombing (they didn't do it), and with the Iraqi government in the year prior to 9/11 and in the lead-up to the Iraq War. She had come to the intelligence community's attention for having earlier passed on a warning -- unheeded -- about the 1993 WTC bombing. Throughout 2001 she personally communicated to the Bush administration a series of increasingly specific and frantic intelligence warnings about an impending attack in NYC involving hijacked airplanes and the World Trade Center. She was also the backdoor negotiator with the Iraqi regime over "WMDs," and had managed to obtain Iraq agreement with all U.S. demands, only to have that agreement ignored and suppressed by an administration intent on war. Angered by the administration's and Republican leadership's subsequent attempts to blame 9/11 and the eventual Iraq quagmire on the failure of the intelligence community to provide adequate intelligence, she went to Congress to lay out what she knew, and was promptly arrested, accused of being an Iraqi spy, and eventually sent to prison for "psychiatric evaluation" and an attempt at stereotypically Stalinist forced drugging.
    [Show full text]
  • Accountability by Numbers: a New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016)
    Article Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016) Genevieve Bates, Ipek Cinar, and Monika Nalepa In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project. e live in an era of democratic backsliding: fragile have access to temporally organized data on how states deal W new democracies are at risk of reverting back to with outgoing autocrats, their collaborators, and perpe- dictatorship. To see examples of this, one need trators of human rights violations.
    [Show full text]
  • The Law of Mental Illness
    DEVELOPMENTS IN THE LAW THE LAW OF MENTAL ILLNESS “[D]oing time in prison is particularly difficult for prisoners with men- tal illness that impairs their thinking, emotional responses, and ability to cope. They have unique needs for special programs, facilities, and extensive and varied health services. Compared to other prisoners, moreover, prisoners with mental illness also are more likely to be ex- ploited and victimized by other inmates.” HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, ILL-EQUIPPED: U.S. PRISONS AND OFFENDERS WITH MENTAL ILLNESS 2 (2003), available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003/usa1003.pdf. “[I]ndividuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular minority who have been faced with restrictions and limitations, subjected to a history of purposeful unequal treatment, and relegated to a position of political powerlessness in our society, based on characteristics that are beyond the control of such individuals and resulting from stereotypic assumptions not truly indicative of the individual ability of such indi- viduals to participate in, and contribute to, society . .” Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-336, § 2(a)(7), 104 Stat. 327, 329 (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 12101 (2000)). “We as a Nation have long neglected the mentally ill . .” Remarks [of President John F. Kennedy] on Proposed Measures To Combat Mental Illness and Mental Retardation, PUB. PAPERS 137, 138 (Feb. 5, 1963). “[H]umans are composed of more than flesh and bone . [M]ental health, just as much as physical health, is a mainstay of life.” Madrid v. Gomez, 889 F. Supp. 1146, 1261 (N.D. Cal.
    [Show full text]
  • World Watchers International Mae Brussell Sprouts a Center
    Mae Brussell Sprouts a Center Her Legacy of Research, services at a reasonable fee until the full Truth Seeking, and library can be catalogued and opened. Exposure Continues Computer and FAX networks and equip- ment will soon make it possible to transfer n rior to her death, Mae Brussell re- documents directly across the country. World Watchers r quested that her collected research • Gathering and disseminating Mae International materials he moved to Santa Cruz, and that Brussell's analysis of past events and a Center be established there in her name. The 11EIV,y21frali01: current trends from her many broadcast Her friends and fellow researchers, John tapes and written materials. Turning the MAE BRUSSELL Judge and Tom Davis took responsibility collection into a computer data base will RESEARCH CENTER to find a suitable location for her 7,000 allow us to pull out Mae's words on any books, 42 filing cabinets of clippings, hun- Fall 1989 Vol. 1, No. 1 given name or topic. dreds of video and tape cassettes, and tens • Serving as a repository for other re- of thousands of pages of her own writing searchers' collected materials, and pub- and related materials. John Judge also lishing articles and manuscripts on re- donated his 20 year collection of thou- lated topics. sands of books and articles to the archive. The Center was set up in Santa Cruz in Mae, Tom Davis, Kyenne Brussell, Penny January of this year, and we are working Williams, Paul Haeberli, Bob & Carolyn hard to make greater access possible. A Dean, Bob Cutler, Dave Ratcliffe and oth- core group of staff and volunteers is han- ers made generous initial donations to dling tape and article duplication, research help get it off the ground.
    [Show full text]
  • The Midwest 9/11 Truth Conference, 2013 Event Videos Now on Youtube
    This version of Total HTML Converter is unregistered. NewsFollowup Franklin Scandal Omaha Sitemap Obama Comment Search Pictorial index home Midwest 9/11 Truth Go to Midwest 9/11 Truth Conference The Midwest 9/11 Truth Conference 2014 page Architects & Engineers Conference, 2013 for 9/11 Truth Mini / Micro Nukes 9/11 Truth links Event videos now on YouTube, World911Truth Cheney, Planning and Decision Aid System speakers: Sonnenfeld Video of 9/11 Ground Zero Victims and Rescuers Wayne Madsen , Investigative Journalist, and 9/11 Whistleblowers AE911Truth James Fetzer, Ph.D., Founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth Ed Asner Contact: Steve Francis Compare competing Kevin Barrett, co-founder Muslim Jewish Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth [email protected] theories The Midwest 9/11 Truth Conference 2014 is now in the planning stages. Top 9/11 Documentaries US/British/Saudi/Zionists Research Speakers: The Midwest 9/11 Wayne Madsen Truth Conference Jim Fetzer Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative James H. Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is This version of Total HTML Converter is unregistered. journalist, author and columnist. He has written for The Village Distinguished McKnight Professor Emeritus on the Duluth Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal, campus of the University of Minnesota. A magna cum CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider, In These laude in philosophy graduate of Princeton University in Times, and The American Conservative. His columns have 1962, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and appeared in The Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, became an artillery officer who served in the Far East. Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, After a tour supervising recruit training in San Diego, he and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.
    [Show full text]
  • Navigating Troubled Waters a History of Commercial Fishing in Glacier Bay, Alaska
    National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve Navigating Troubled Waters A History of Commercial Fishing in Glacier Bay, Alaska Author: James Mackovjak National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve “If people want both to preserve the sea and extract the full benefit from it, they must now moderate their demands and structure them. They must put aside ideas of the sea’s immensity and power, and instead take stewardship of the ocean, with all the privileges and responsibilities that implies.” —The Economist, 1998 Navigating Troubled Waters: Part 1: A History of Commercial Fishing in Glacier Bay, Alaska Part 2: Hoonah’s “Million Dollar Fleet” U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve Gustavus, Alaska Author: James Mackovjak 2010 Front cover: Duke Rothwell’s Dungeness crab vessel Adeline in Bartlett Cove, ca. 1970 (courtesy Charles V. Yanda) Back cover: Detail, Bartlett Cove waters, ca. 1970 (courtesy Charles V. Yanda) Dedication This book is dedicated to Bob Howe, who was superintendent of Glacier Bay National Monument from 1966 until 1975 and a great friend of the author. Bob’s enthusiasm for Glacier Bay and Alaska were an inspiration to all who had the good fortune to know him. Part 1: A History of Commercial Fishing in Glacier Bay, Alaska Table of Contents List of Tables vi Preface vii Foreword ix Author’s Note xi Stylistic Notes and Other Details xii Chapter 1: Early Fishing and Fish Processing in Glacier Bay 1 Physical Setting 1 Native Fishing 1 The Coming of Industrial Fishing: Sockeye Salmon Attract Salters and Cannerymen to Glacier Bay 4 Unnamed Saltery at Bartlett Cove 4 Bartlett Bay Packing Co.
    [Show full text]
  • Terrorism: a False Threat
    TERRORISM: A FALSE THREAT John Scales Avery December 15, 2019 Introduction Terrorism, a pseudothreat This book consists mainly of chapters and articles that I have previously pub- lished, although a considerable amount of new material has been added. The book deals with the terrible consequences of the so-called “War on Terror” which followed the 9/11 attacks. Is the threat of terrorism real? Or is it like the barking of a dog driving a herd? The threat of catastrophic climate change is very real indeed. The threat to future global food security is real too. Already 11 million children die every year from malnutrition and poverty-related causes. The threat to human civilization and the biosphere posed by a possible Third World War is real. The threat of exhaustion of non-renewable resources and economic collapse is real. The dangers associated with our unstable fractional reserve banking system are also real. Beside these all too real threats to our future, the threat of terrorism is vanishingly small. Millions starve. Millions die yearly from preventable diseases. Millions die as a consequence of wars. Compared with these numbers, the total count of terrorist victims is vanishingly small. It is even invisible compared with the number of people killed yearly in automobile accidents. The official story of 9/11 is untrue There is strong evidence, available to everyone who is willing to look at it on the Internet, which shows that the official version of 9/11 is untrue, and that the US government made the disaster worse than it otherwise would have been in order to justify not only an unending “War on Terror”, but also the abridgement of civil liberties within the United States.
    [Show full text]
  • Radical Road Maps
    RADICAL ROAD MAPS JamesJames H.H. HansenHansen RADICAL ROAD MAPS Uncovering the Web of Connections Among Far-Left Groups in America WND BOOKS AN IMPRINT OF CUMBERLAND HOUSE PUBLISHING, INC. NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE RADICAL ROAD MAPS A WND BOOK PUBLISHED BY CUMBERLAND HOUSE PUBLISHING, INC. 431 Harding Industrial Drive Nashville, Tennessee 37211 Copyright © 2006 by James H. Hansen All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical reviews and articles. Cover design by Linda Daly Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hansen, James H. Radical road maps : uncovering the web of connections among far-left groups in America / James Hansen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-1-58182-530-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58182-530-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Radicalism—United States. 2. Left-wing extremists—United States. I. Title. HN90.R3H37 2006 320.530973—dc22 2005032881 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10—10 09 08 07 06 CONTENTS Introduction 7 List of Abbreviations 13 1 What’s at Stake Now 21 2 Lessons from the Cold War 37 3 It Has All Happened Before 59 4 Get the Right Tools 81 5 Groups, Leaders, and Their Linkages: Before 1960 93 6 Groups, Leaders, and Their Linkages: 1960–99 113 7 Groups, Leaders, and Their Linkages: 2000–Present 153 8 In Step with Other Institutions 169 9 What They Say and Carry 195 10 Losing the Compass: Episodes from John Kerry’s Career 205 11 The Road Ahead 211 Conclusion 233 Appendix: Outrageous Quotations 241 Notes 247 Bibliography 271 Index 275 INTRODUCTION HIS BOOK EXAMINES THE significant groups of the Far Left in America Ttoday and discusses how they connect and interact, how they oper- ate, what they profess, and why this matters.
    [Show full text]
  • „Merkel-Putin-Coming-Out“ (Pdf)
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ndere meinen, für das Management ei- ner Olympia-Kandidatur, die mit Bildern und Liedern aus dem Wendeherbst 1989 gegen nationale Konkurrenz das Rennen machte, sei mehr Sensibilität vonnöten. Tiefensee selbst hatte bei der Städtekür auf der Bühne mit dem Cello „Dona nobis pa- cem“ intoniert, die Botschaft der friedli- chen Revolution gegen die Staatsmacht. Eine „schwierige Debatte“, sagte er ver- gangenen Mittwoch, als Thärichen auf zu- nehmenden Druck beschlossen hatte, sein Amt einstweilen ruhen zu lassen. „Eine Entscheidung ist immer in der Situation zu sehen, in der sie gefällt wurde.“ Von heu- te aus betrachtet, deutet Tiefensee damit wohl an, war Thärichens Berufung falsch. Bei dem SPD-Politiker schien zunächst der bewährte Reflex zu funktionieren: Der Spross einer katholischen Bürgerfamilie PETER ENDIG / DPA versteht es, notwendige Reparaturen – Leipziger Olympia-Werbung: „Nationale Aufgabe“ auch nach selbst verschuldeten Unfällen – als gewollte Verschönerung zu verkaufen.
    [Show full text]
  • The Destabilization of the USSR: Anti-Fascist Archive #36 W/ Dave Emory (1991)
    The Destabilization of the USSR: Anti-Fascist Archive #36 w/ Dave Emory (1991) ORIGINAL: https://spitfirelist.com/anti-fascist-archives/rfa-36-the-destabilization-of-the-ussr-and-eastern-europe/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpxlLaDA_c4 This program analyzes the Persian Gulf War, U.S. covert action in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and Reagan-Bush defense and foreign policies as coordinated elements of a strategy to pressure and destabilize Russia. The broadcast focuses on American promotion of resurgent fascist elements in that part of the world and the possibility that the American strategy might result in a return of the Cold War or the start of a third world war. (Originally Broadcast March 1991) Referenced a lot in this audio: https://archive.org/details/CovertActionInformationBulletinNo35TheCIAInEasternEurope A rough breakdown: 00:00:00 The USSR and the Gulf War, variety of news articles discussed 00:47:24 'The NED Meddles in Lithuania' by Philip Bonosky 02:28:11 'A Full Court Press: The Destabilization of the Soviet Union' by Sean Gervasi 03:44:00 Interview with Lanny Simkin, formerly of the Christic Institute, about US covert operations and the Gulf War 04:25:35 On the role of the US far right in the dismantling of the Soviet Union: 'The Free Congress Foundation Goes East' by Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf 05:46:15 Excerpts from AFA #1, about the Nazis and then the CIA/Gehlen Org working with collaborators among the Soviet population 06:35:30 Excerpts from AFA #14 on the World Anti-Communist League from 1986 (audio
    [Show full text]
  • Conversations with Vladimir Putin, P.69 Back to Text 28
    PUTINS PEOPLE How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West Catherine Belton Copyright William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright © Catherine Belton 2020 Cover photograph © Getty Images Catherine Belton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e- book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down- loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780007578795 Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780007578801 Version: 2020-04-29 Dedication To my parents, Marjorie and Derek, as well as to Richard and to Catherine Birkett. Epigraph ‘Russian organised-crime leaders, their members, their associates, are moving into Western Europe, they are purchasing property, they are establishing bank accounts, theyre establishing companies, theyre weaving themselves into the fabric of society, and by the time that Europe develops an awareness its going to be too late. Former FBI special agent Bob Levinson ‘I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions.
    [Show full text]
  • Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World
    P1: SBT 9780521188742pre CUNY1276/Macrakis 978 0 521 88747 2 January 17, 2008 14:21 This page intentionally left blank ii P1: SBT 9780521188742pre CUNY1276/Macrakis 978 0 521 88747 2 January 17, 2008 14:21 SEDUCED BY SECRETS More fascinating than fiction, Seduced by Secrets takes the reader inside the real world of one of the most effective and feared spy agencies in history. The book reveals, for the first time, the secret technical methods and sources of the Stasi (East German Ministry for State Security) as it stole secrets from abroad and developed gadgets at home, employing universal, highly guarded techniques often used by other spy and security agencies. Seduced by Secrets draws on secret files from the Stasi archives, includ- ing CIA-acquired material, interviews and friendships, court documents, and unusual visits to spy sites, including “breaking into” a prison, to demonstrate that the Stasi overestimated the power of secrets to solve problems and cre- ated an insular spy culture more intent on securing its power than protecting national security. It re-creates the Stasi’s secret world of technology through biographies of agents, defectors, and officers and by visualizing James Bond– like techniques and gadgets. In this highly original book, Kristie Macrakis adds a new dimension to our understanding of the East German Ministry for State Security by bringing the topic into the realm of espionage history and exiting politically charged commentary. Kristie Macrakis is a professor of the history of science at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University in 1989 and then spent a postdoctoral year in Berlin, Germany.
    [Show full text]